@JnG, this is how I'm starting to think about skill acquisition, specifically *what* skills to focus on. It starts at the beginning, so just skip forward until it become relevant.
Phase 0: Essentials
Step1: Stop doing anything you don't need to. Address the big 3, do a minimalism purge, do a #buynothing, do the "stop all the things" practices to pare your life down to basics.
Step 2: Identify the Essential Activities in your life, the stuff basically everyone has to do. Food, shelter, transportation, your body, your mind, your social world. So the Activities are grocery shop and cook food; keep up the house/apt/van; maintain the car/bicycle; exercise - mobility, strength training, cardio; introspection/reflection, therapy, cognitive functions and emotional health; social skills; personal finance.
Step 3: Deliberately seek to level up in all of the Essential Life Skills until all of them are "pretty good" to "above average". Any deficiency in The Essentials is going to be a weakest link / Liebig's Law of the Minimum constraint. Learn to cook well, maintain your bicycle, stay fit without a gym membership, deepen relationships, start to heal old emotional baggage and improve cognitive function, read good books, etc.
Phase 1: Delight-Led Skill Broadening
Start in a domain in your life that already has some yield generation and stoke, and investigate laterally. The interactive banner at the top of
this website is sort of how I think about this - pick an x,y seed spot, and the spot maybe doesn't super matter, and use delight as a compass to explore peripherally from there. But unlike the interactive banner, the idea isn't to pick just one x,y spot, it's to pick several and then cultivate connections.
Choosing an x,y spot: list out your areas of specialty and stoke, and cluster them as much as you can. I think at this point, the "best" process is to pick a skill that you already generate a yield with (money, food, shelter, etc), and then see what other skills you can connect to it. If another yield-generating skill can be connected, fine. But the idea I have is that if you can connect a skill that
isn't currently generating a yield to one that
is, that can be a way to "pull" the non-yield generating skill up into yield-generating territory. And since they're connected, you've just established a relationship between those two things.
Example: my "digital art" skill is currently yield-generating (money), and my "dirtbag design/build" skill is yielding cheap shelter (and with a little effort, it would probably also yield money). My writing and photography skills are not currently generating any yields. I'm working on improving the connection between digital art and dirtbag design/build (by taking the time to make good digital art of my builds), and then connecting those to writing and photography (writing/telling the story of my builds and lifestyle, and taking photographs of builds and lifestyle). Since I'm using writing to "boost" my yield on digital art, I'm motivated to actually invest time in writing consistently and better. As I do so, I'm starting to notice other ways I might be stoked to employ writing that don't have anything to do with digital art. But "connecting" writing to digital art is how I engaged with it enough to notice other possible connections.
The point I'm trying to illustrate is that I identified a cluster of skills with obvious-to-me potential connections, anchored on a yield-generating skill, that are all mutually reinforcing. After some level of maturity, I see this as a supercluster of skills that leads to a system where there isn't much of a distinction between the various skills or yields: I might write about my digital art, or do digital art about my builds, or take photographs to illustrate a bit of non-fiction I submit to a publication, and it's all sort of on-theme to the kind of projects I want to be spending my time on. The writing connects me to interesting people who might invite me to come build something cool for them, yielding money, shelter, and/or food, and I'll take photographs and write about that experience, which just continues to mature the supercluster.
I think the "yield-generating supercluster" approach is the most structured method I can think of. Other x,y points and connections might be pure delight-led, as in "I want to learn to garden and I like to smoke spliffs once a month, so I'm going to try growing a tobacco and a pot plant and then learn to trim/dry and roll my own... and hell, I'll throw some tomato seeds in the dirt too". In five years maybe I'll be a master gardener (or a brain-fried emphysemic, watch out for those negative second-order effects...), or maybe I'll have started writing about my garden with nice pictures, and selling those articles, and incorporated a more "organic" aesthetic into my digital art and builds and I become known as "the dirtbag Gaudi" ....
But I really think "delight-led" is a key here. I think it's easy to read the book and think "right! gotta skill up!" and get a list of skillz from somewhere and get started in alphabetical order, but then it's like whoa I actually have
zero stoke for learning how to sew my own mukluks, and you stagnate.
Somewhat related:
David Epstein in Range wrote:When I was a college runner, I had teammates whose drive and determination seemed almost boundless on the track, and nearly absent in the classroom, and vice versa. Instead of asking whether someone is gritty, we should ask when they are. “If you get someone into a context that suits them,” Ogas said, “they’ll more likely work hard and it will look like grit from the outside."
tl;dr-- apply some "is this useful?" heuristics, but in general follow your stoke or you're probably wasting your time.